the student respond that the soldier was powerless before God. Escape to Poland; Kiev era After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the Alter ordered his students to cross the border into Poland. this was a top secret operation that not even the parents knew about. Many of the students were shot in the attempt; others were sent to Siberian prison camps, but six hundred made it across the border. In 1919, when the Yeshiva was fleeing the war and was stationed in Kiev, a typhus outbreak occurred in the Yeshiva. The Alter succumbed to it. Interwar period The Alter's son-in-law, Rabbi Avraham Yoffen, was the head of the Novardok yeshiva in Białystok, the biggest Yeshiva in Poland between the two world wars. This yeshiva Beis Yosef, which was the name of all Novardok yeshivas in Poland, supervised 30 other Beis Yosef yeshivas. The Novardok philosophy Self-improvement Novardok had its own unique outlook, stressing the total negation of ego and the physical world. Through this, the complete and total focus of a person can be on his spiritual and intellectual side. Like other Mussar schools, Novardok demanded the complete shattering of personal desires, eradicating any vestige of evil habits. For that purpose, students would carry notebooks, in which they would daily enter records of failures and achievements. Before bedtime, they would check their "bookkeeping" and make plans-of-action for correcting faults. One method of "breaking" oneself was by denying oneself extra pleasures of this world. Students of Novardok participated in deliberately humiliating behaviour, such as wearing old, patched clothing, or going to a shop and asking for a product not sold there, such as screws in a bakery. All Novardok students would share their personal belongings with friends to rid themselves of their desires for worldly possessions. One pupil related that the purpose of these exercises were not to "put yourself down", as is commonly thought. The training, in fact, promoted the opposite; it gave the students the emotional freedom from the chains of public approval. They discovered that the fear of embarrassment was actually much greater than the reality. This strengthened their confidence to do the right thing, oblivious to what others might think. Novardok network An extension of Novardok's unconventional approach entailed the establishment of numerous branches of the yeshiva. The most elite students of the yeshiva would set out on foot to strange communities without money in their pockets,